Whit Stillman’s “The Cosmopolitans”

Twenty-four years after the release of his first feature, “Metropolitan,” and two years after the release of his fourth, “Damsels in Distress,” Whit Stillman—the cinema’s novelist of manners, who reveals deep and enduring patterns beneath the shimmer of apparent frivolities—has written, directed, and produced the twenty-six-minute pilot of a TV-like series, “The Cosmopolitans,” for Amazon (where it premières tomorrow). It has a classical setup—Americans and other foreigners, members of a self-anointed social whirl, tripping through Paris—that, from the start, Stillman makes entirely his own, rendering it both contemporary and anachronistic, of the moment and rooted in time.

There are no Fitzgeralds or Hemingways, no Steins or Pounds, in Stillman’s still-young set of expatriates. (Or, rather, there is one Hemingway—Dree, Ernest’s great-granddaughter, who plays one of the American expats.) If there’s artistic ambition and aesthetic adventure at work among the group that he gathers, it isn’t yet evident; there are no late-night discussions of lofty creative ideals. Rather, there’s love and real estate—and a constant jockeying for a nose ahead in the competition for esteem (or “reputation”). Cafés there are: the series has a long café scene up front, in which two American men, Jimmy (Adam Brody) and Hal (Jordan Rountree), talk with Sandro (Adriano Giannini), an Italian cynic of a certain age, who offers the young men aphoristically critical life advice and gives them a display of knowing worldliness that sparks both action and confusion—and that lures a young woman from the next table.

Her story, a fragment of it, involves someone who seems like a French realtor coaxing her into a tiny and ill-appointed maid’s room in a great neighborhood in Paris.* The facts that emerge prove even more telling, but in any case the woman—Aubrey Lee (Carrie MacLemore), a graceful and curious Southerner—is moving, because of a breakup with the French man whom she followed to Paris. Hal, meanwhile, is in an on-and-off relationship with a French woman, Clémence (Clémentine Baert), who keeps him in her clutches—where he’s willing to remain. His romantic ordeal is the mainspring of discussion with Jimmy and Sandro, and it quickly becomes the undesired business of a fourth café-going expat, a woman whom the American men call “gold-coat girl” (Chloë Sévigny). Her deft mockery provokes a strange retort from Jimmy—that he and Hal are no mere Americans in Paris but have actually become Parisians.

Jimmy’s boast (Stillman’s joke) hints at the director’s big subject. In a time of shifting and blended identities, Stillman remains a creator of sharply defined and seemingly rigid ones, of large differences of nature and culture alike—men and women (casually called girls), winners and losers, nationalities, stations of life. But, for Stillman, these categories are not simply stamps on his characters; they’re the very essence of his cinematic form.

The hard-shelled, clearly labelled identity is a fiercely modern cinematic device. It’s one that (like many other such devices) is pressed into open view in Godard’s “Breathless,” in a dialogue riff that features Jean-Paul Belmondo categorizing stock characters akin to those present in the movie: “Informers inform, burglars burgle, murderers murder, lovers love.” There was then, in 1960—and there is, even more, now—a sort of critically popular faux-observational style of drama in which filmmakers keep what they know about their characters close to the vest and dose out information incrementally, by letting their undefined characters seem to define themselves by their actions, which viewers are allowed to peep in on in a pseudo-documentary style. By contrast, stock characters, labelled, are in a state of struggle from the moment they appear onscreen—a struggle with or against their own identities. Watching the observational drama as blanks fill themselves in evokes surprise; watching the drama of identity fuels suspense.

This suspense is at the heart of Stillman’s drama; it’s how he gives a theatrical kick to situations that are spare on action. He equips his characters with expository dialogue that’s so smart and sharp that it, too, seems like a sort of action—thought in action. But then he sets those characters in motion and puts them to the test. He also puts their identities to the test, with the comedy and the drama of self-definition and self-creation (this comes to the fore especially in “Damsels in Distress”). In effect, for Stillman, exposition is a matter of form; the deft interweaving, from the very start of “The Cosmopolitans,” of disparate situations arises from a sense that labelling, whether through self-identification or the identification of others, is itself an act of high drama.

The bulk of the pilot of “The Cosmopolitans” involves several of Stillman’s signature subjects. The first is a party: the male trio, plus Aubrey, head to a soirée at the posh apartment of an arrogantly wealthy Parisian acquaintance (or perhaps a German in Paris), Fritz (Freddy Åsblom). For Stillman, parties are laboratories where possibilities arise suddenly from the close and quickly ricocheting contacts of social atoms—and where social rules, hidden beneath the murky surface of daily life, emerge more clearly, in ritualized isolation. The second is something that happens at the party: a dance, but a formally patterned one where the rules are the very subject. It’s strange that, though every one of Stillman’s movies involves dancing, he is a cinematic master of bodies at rest; it’s as if he sees dance (the kind that has any value to him, the kind that has rules) as the physical counterpart to his socially sensitive characters’ dashing dialogue.

Good talking, good dancing, good manners, good clothing, good eating. Within Stillman’s refined classicism is another sharp division of identities—between workers and drones. But it’s his very sense of beauty, his taste for the elegant moves on the board of complex social games, that crosses the lines; he makes frivolity itself seem essential, leisure a necessity, idleness an essential mode of creation—and money all the more important, yet still insufficient.

There’s obviously something conservative about Stillman’s work, but, as nostalgia goes, his is an immensely productive and forward-looking one. His vision of a world in which traditional modes of behavior are preserved is also one in which those modes are still active—what he imports from the past is equally latent, though unexpressed, in the present. He isn’t so much reviving traditional ideas as revealing what he seems to consider enduring truths. The narrow social group in the pilot of “The Cosmopolitans” has tendrils that reach far and deep. Stillman’s sense of power is serious: within the febrile exclusivity of his glossy set is an underlying quest to clearly see the way in which the world works. The pilot of “The Cosmopolitans,” I hope, will win the series an enduring life.

*Correction: Owing to an editing error, an earlier version of this post misidentified the profession of the man who coaxed Aubrey Lee into her apartment.

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com.